CLEMSON - Greenie Van Buren called her daughter's name from the stands of Littlejohn Coliseum.

"Kendra. Kendra. Kendra," she repeated, waving at the throng of graduates clad in purple and black robes.

Her husband, Donald, held a camera, recording the moment that the Ph.D candidate in civil engineering walked past them on the gym floor below. They flew from California to watch their daughter receive her degree, which she will use when she moves to New Mexico next month to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The young woman paused, looked up and smiled, and her mother called her name again.

"Kendra!"

She was among hundreds of students crossing the stage for the Thursday morning graduation ceremony at Clemson University. Their friends and family filled about three-quarters of the coliseum.

Hundreds more repeated the process in the afternoon.

With the winter ceremony for the Class of 2012 came a cold drizzle but also Christmas carols to greet families as they walked into the coliseum.

Sitting behind the Van Burens were the Mahajans, a mother and father who traveled all the way from Pune City, India, to watch their daughter, Pooja, receive her master's degree in environmental engineering.

"They are very proud," Pooja's friend, Sameer Samant, said. Samant, who is from Mumbai, graduated last year from Clemson. "It's a big thing — especially for her because of the cultural differences and academic differences."

Despite calls for respecting the "solemn nature" of the two-hour ceremony, a few friends and family screamed the names of graduates and erupted into intermittent applause.

Zepeng Xue, a master's student in mechanical engineering, beamed from the floor as his mother — who flew in from Beijing for the occasion — snapped his picture.

Ben Savino, whose son Anthony received his bachelor's degree in biological science, said his son plans to be a physician's assistant. Ten family members, most of them from New York, cheered for him as he went by.

The Class of 2012 saw enormous changes at Clemson University, with two major academic buildings — Lee Hall expansion and the Bio Sciences Life Sciences Building — opening in just the past 12 months. The class also witnessed historic cuts to higher education funding from the state of South Carolina, which at about 30 percent statewide since the 2008 recession has led the nation.

Clemson rebounded with a $600 million capital campaign, recently expanded to $1 billion, and staffing cutbacks and hires that realigned and focused academic programs across the campus.

Retired astronaut and Lancaster native Charles Moss Duke Jr., the 10th man to walk on the moon, received an honorary doctorate of sciences during the ceremony. Quoting lines from Dr. Seuss' "On Beyond Zebra," Duke encouraged the students to be prepared emotionally and mentally for unimaginable changes ahead.

"He almost fell flat on his face on the floor when I picked up the chalk and drew one letter more," Duke quoted from Seuss.

He said he's lived most of his life "beyond Z" and said Clemson's graduates on Thursday, as the nation's leaders in a few decades, can do the same.

Duke is chairman of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, which confers $10,000 scholarships to a student at each of 28 campuses — including Clemson — across the nation annually.

Trained as a fighter and test pilot in the 1950s, Duke volunteered for NASA's astronaut program and took part in the Apollo 16 mission as a lunar module pilot. He and fellow astronaut John Young would spend about 20 hours on the moon and logged 256 hours in space.

Duke started his life in a textile town, his father born shortly after the Wright Brothers first flew a plane at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

"I didn't go to my mama and say 'I want to walk on the moon,'" Duke said. "She would have checked me into a psychiatric hospital."

Years later as he was raising his own children, he said, all their neighbors were astronauts and "everyone was going to the moon." With vision, planning, teamwork and preparation, he said, Clemson's graduates will also go places they never thought possible.